Sunday, 24 September 2017

Large-scale cloning is common in both organic and cultural evolution. Multi-cellular organisms are largely clones of a single genotype, though some "somatic mosaicism" does happen. In the cultural realm, there are large-scale clones of a variety of books, music files, vidoes and pieces of computer software.

Though there's not much difference between organic and cultural evolution in this respect, they do seem a little bit different when it comes to spatially-distributed megaclones. In the organic realm, megaclones are mostly single organisms. Asexual reproduction does produce a similar effect. For example, dandelions reproduce asexually, and nearby dandelion plants are often closely related. However, there's no coordination maintaining the genetic similarity, and so over time the genomes diverge.

In the cultural realm, if you look at software like Android or iOS, these are massive distributed megaclones. These are good examples of cultural eusociality. The manufacturer is like the queen, while the individual phone handsets are like drones. Unlike the situation with ants or bees, variation due to sexual recombination is pretty minimal - so the whole system is closely related and can be modelled as being a single distributed cultural organism.

Money is another classic example of a large-scale distributed cultural megaclone. The notes and coins are typically identical on a large scale (not counting their serial numbers). Here the "queen" is the mint, while the notes are the "drones".

Megaclones are often important determinants of what counts as an evolutionary unit. A megaclone can be modelled as an individual, or an organism, without too much concern for conflict between the cloned units.

That distributed megaclones seem more viable in the cultural realm has an important effect on the evolutionary dynamics involved - namely cultural evolution has lifted the size limit on organisms. Blue whales are pretty big animals, but cultural megaclones, can span the entire planet easily these days. It looks as though some future organisms will be enormous.

Sunday, 17 September 2017

The demographic transition describes how rich countries often wind up with sub-replacement fertility levels. To sustain their populations each woman needs to have at least two children. Yet in Japan, the fertility rate is 1.4. In South Korea, it is 1.3. In Hong Kong, it is 1.2. In Taiwan it is 1.1. For more stats on this see here.

This is a bit of a puzzle for the "at all boils down to DNA genes" versions of evolutionary theory (i.e. most sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) - since basic theory predicts that the more resources you give an organism, the more offspring they are expected to have.

The standard memetic explanation for this is that memes compete with genes for resources and act to divert host resources from making more DNA genes to making more memes. Dawkins gave essentially this explanation in 1976, referring in particular to the low fertility of priests - and how their resources were being directed away from gene propagation and into meme propagation.

Conventional explanations of the phenomena observe that famale choice is involved. Years of college education in girls is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Educated girls are waiting longer before having kids and are then having fewer of them. Another fairly obvious factor is cheap family planning technology.

There are some explanations that don't involve memes. For example the r/K selection axis is fairly clearly involved - and it is possible that some environments act as superstimulii for faculative K-selection mechanisms - producing a maladaptive response. Faculative K-selection mechanisms are certainly part of the story, but they are more like one of the targets that the memes use to effect their results than the main story.

I think the main mechanism is that influential female role models tend to be those who have prioritised meme reproduction over their DNA genes. While mothers are busy raising their children they have less time and resources available for influencing others.
On the other hand, take Jennifer Aniston, for example. Apparently she has said: "I've never in my life said I didn't want to have children. I did and I do and I will... I would never give up that experience for a career." However, somehow or another she still doesn't have any kids. Women who have prioritized their career over having kids are more likely to be publicly-visible role models - leading to a meme-driven plague of female infertility.

I am fascinated by self-conscious expressions of this tendency. Steven Pinker provided me with some early examples:

Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes.

...and...

By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake.

Dawkins famously wrote:

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

The most important thing you can do, to avoid global disaster and make a positive contribution to the world, is avoid having children.

He goes on to explain:

Overpopulation is a tremendous danger to civilization and the ecosphere. It makes every human-caused ecological problem bigger. Population growth has slowed but not stopped. The human population is expected to grow by 2 or 3 billion by 2050, and it is not clear how to find water and food for all those people. Population growth also increases the difficulty of curbing global heating. Thus, the decision about having children is, for most people, the most important decision in their lives about how they will affect humanity's resource footprint in the future.

I am more pro-natal than anti-Natal. I'm not especially evangelical on the issue, though I do describe some of the anti-natalists as being "pro-death" and generally warn against their influence.

I think Stallman is mistaken in thinking that more people will make the world worse. I am more with Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource - more people are better. China looks set to be a big force in the 21st century. Their secret is that they have more people - and that means more scientists, engineers and other folk that make the world a better place. Overpopulation seems like a very distant hazard to me - the carrying capacity of the planet is clearly enormous.

Underpopulation is much more serious problem. This century is likely to see "peak human" - as people spend more and more time in computer-generated environments and in the company of sexbots and virtual catwomen. As machines rise, the human gene pool is likely to falter and then fall. Anti-natalism will be part of how it happens. I generally favour slow transitions over fast ones. I don't think procreation will save the humans from being made redundant by technology, but lack of procreation could lead to a more rapid demise for humans, and a rapid transition increases the chance of important information getting lost during the transition.

As for the moral dimension of Darwinism, that debate dates back to Huxley and Kropotkin. Huxley argued that nature was bad:

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. [...] But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

...while by contrast, Kropotkin saw evolution as leading to cooperation and morality. My position is much more on Kropotkin's side than Huxley's. Yes, evolution has produced some suffering, but give it a chance: it hasn't finished booting up yet.

Sunday, 3 September 2017

In summary, we can divide the development of life into three stages, distinguished by life’s ability to design itself:

Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolves its hardware and software

Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolves its hardware, designs much of its software

Life 3.0 (technological stage): designs its hardware and software

This isn't a classification scheme I have heard of before. Tegmark introduces the scheme by saying:

I find it helpful to classify life forms into three levels of sophistication: Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

My first reaction was that these categories were three of the floors in the Tower of Optimization classification scheme I proposed back in 2011.

My second reaction was that Tegmark's numbering scheme seems pseudoscientific. I named my tower floors, rather than numbering them to better allow for future insertions and deletions. However Tegmark only has three categories.

There's an existing literature on the major evolutionary transitions. To say that scientists don't agree with Tegmark's classification scheme seems like a big understatement to me. Numbering schemes seem rather premature.

In my essay, I at least cited some prior work in the field - while Tegmark doesn't seem to have any citations at all. Presumably Max Tegmark made this classification scheme up. It seems like an example of how not to perform scientific classification to me.

A new book on Internet memes was published by MIT press in 2016. It is called "The World Made Meme" and it is by Ryan M. Milner. Here is the MIT press page about the book. The book has 272 pages and there are hardback and paperback editions.

I have very briefly skimmed the book in a boostore. It has a large number of pictures of image macros in it, along with a lot of accompaning text. The blurb explains that the book is about internet memes and their effect on public conversations. I'll try to review the book in due course.

This is the second MIT press book on internet memes in recent years. While I look forward to there being more, scientists really need to work on memes more than internet memes. It's true that internet memes are the latest, shiniest type - but it all seems rather like Darwin writing about earthworms rather than evolution.